Better Late Then Never

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Victoria herself said that Dinnerladies looked old fashioned against the Royle Family but I believe that its format is its strength. I remember watching the first series and thinking this is not as good as I expected from Victoria Wood but you have to watch it again because now I think both the series are genius. Fantastic scripts (apparently there is not an ad-lib, everything is tightly scripted) written brilliantly. It rewards repeated watching and just gets funnier every time you see it. The performances are fantastic from all the cast-special mentions for Andrew Dunn, Duncan Preston, Celia Imrie, Shobna Gulati, Anne Reid and the fantastic Thelma Barlow. Maxine Peake (brilliant actress) was so lucky to get the part of Twinkle as her first acting job. Even the small appearances are wonderfully observed and performed.I find it incredible that Miss Wood can write, compose, act and play at such an incredibly high standard. Whether other countries could really relate to the humour is a mystery to me but comedy relies on timing and I find myself laughing at US references in Frasier even though I may not know the situation they are referring to. I think thats down to timing. Maybe Dinnerladies will work that way too, 'cos the timing is spot on.If you have watched and not liked it,try it again-you may be very pleasantly surprised. I am watching again for what must be the twentieth time, both my wife and I still laugh out loud at lines we know backwards. That is the combination of writing, performance and timing.I guess it is peculiarly English and will not travel well, but that does not make it any less brilliant. Oct 2012 - I have just watched episode 1 of series 1 , having caught it on Gold. It was the one with which I was originally disappointed . I cannot for the life of me see why now. It just hit the ground running and was a hoot from the beginning. The characters were fully formed and incredibly acted down to the smallest part, for example - the stripper delivers her couple of lines with consummate skill. If I have one criticism it would be Julie Walters' part - the viewer is left to decide whether she is totally barmy or not and she seems a little young to be Victoria Woods' mom. It is a piece of work which can be watched again and again and still find funny stuff and lines which you missed the last time round.

It's no secret that Victoria Wood is a fan of soaps and it's clear that as a child she spent a lot of time watching popular TV, as did most of us. dinnerladies, which at the time of broadcast was presented as a revival of the sit-com has plenty of soap-opera aspects as well, and is all the better for them.For best results the episodes should be viewed in order, a mobile phone mentioned in the very last episode makes an appearance in the first one. We get to see character development and physical changes, not all of these parts of the story. Over time characters are filled out and we get more idea of what makes them tick. In fact this is done more carefully in dinnerladies than in some drama. In the world of TV, even in the Flintstones it grates when something you think you know about a character is arbitrarily changed, either because that week's writer doesn't know as much about the show as you do or they haven't worked the plot out thoroughly. In dinnerladies tremendous attention to detail is paid.This is an ensemble piece, like Dad's Army and the other Perry/Croft classics and we can recognise the naïve and gormless youth (Anita) and the daft ineffective officer type, Philippa /Celia Imrie. Some characters have catch phrases and these are worked into dialogue which is more like real speech, the way some people like to dwell on their medical problems.In films such as Full Monty, Billy Elliot and Brassed Off we get a side order of rather heavy handed politics, the noble worker verses the dead hand of political cost/benefit analysis etc. In dinnerladies the factory and the canteen have an uncertain future; this is a canteen in a manufacturing company for a start. Come to that a canteen is something of an anachronism, the business world is just so vulnerable to re-evaluating what matters, one day providing an in-house catering facility might be the height of corporate fashion, next week they want to use the floor space to provide space for focus groups. But the canteen staff don't see their work as a vocation, this is slinging pies not M*A*S*H. But for some the work is very important, when Stan gets the toaster going in time for the morning rush its Apollo 13 and the joy of being part a team, even if it is a team of women with a non-stop parade of embarrassing women's problems.But the women have other issues, husbands and parents to worry about and be tormented by. In a favourite episode Thora Hird, Dora Bryan and Eric Sykes make appearances in a "Take your Mother to work day". We get more background story on everyone and when it transpires that Philippa too has a dreadful mother for the first time she becomes a character we have some sympathy for. Perry and Croft didn't do this and the authentic soaps don't always it properly, they often just introduce horrible people who mellow, for no particular reason, over time.The cast is superb, Anne Reid (Jean) and Thelma Barlow (Dolly) deliver comic lines superbly and, authentically the workplace banter is very funny. If someone smiles at a line it's because that character got the joke, after Acorn Antiques there's no room unscripted behaviour. Julie Walters plays Bren's mum the hideous Petunia. Her main role is to continue to mess up Bren's life. No one pays much heed to her worsening kidney problems, somehow we manage to laugh these off.Comedy is a funny thing though; we want to have a laugh. And that's why the soaps work best with comedy. The catch phrases, the references to other shows, the horrible people, when we want to have a laugh these are all the cues we need.

Dinnerladies is a really excellent comedy. I have watched it over and over again and never seem to be able to get tired of it. The important thing here is that everyone has a life of their own. Taking as a starting point a scene many people might see every day - a canteen in a factory and the people who serve in it - might sound like a very boring idea, but the fact that Bren, Dolly, Anita, Twinkle and Jean are dinnerladies is really only secondary to the plot. Their characters are what really hold the piece together, and that's important. Along with Tony the canteen manager, Stan the handyman, Philippa the human resources manager and Bren's unbelievable yet totally believable (in a sense) mother Petula Gordeno the dinnerladies try to get through their lives. These are average, everyday people and yet they are so well written they can't help but be fascinating. What makes the set all the better is the script itself, and the fact that the characters are not afraid to confront each other, even the most trivial issues. From "I didn't go mad this morning and order one old lady instead of a load of broccoli?" to "I wouldn't need high heels if my feet were attached to a pair of scales" to "We won't see another minnellium" to "You don't treat a female woman like that" there are more classic lines in this sitcom than you can remember all at once. Another touch I especially liked is the subtlety of the script itself. Everything happens for a reason, so that by the time you've finished watching a whole series everything you've seen slots into place and makes total sense. I like this very much.

'dinnerladies' (sic) was a short lived but concise series which was a delight to watch. The scripts were quite simply charming. Victoria Wood's attention to character detail is so well refined, there is little like it elsewhere in the land of situation comedy. Even series which clock up over a hundred episodes do not have the brilliance or depth of character as can be seen here.A lot of the credit also goes to the performers. Particularly Anne Reid and Thelma Barlow as the bickering friends Jean and Dolly respectively. We had seen aspects of Thelma Barlow's comic timing when she was in Coronation Street but it is brought to great fruition here.It may not be as 'in your face' or as loud and bumptious as a lot of nineties comedies and I feel it is sad that 'dinnerladies' is often compared to these others. This is a series of pure classic comedy writing - showing off a great knowledge of idiolect and pathos.Victoria Wood kept the series short to leave on a high note, and she certainly did. The second series proved just how brilliant a writer she is. I certainly hope she pens another sitcom of an equal standard sometime in the future.